Honeybees do more than just follow the “direction and distance” in another bee’s waggle dance. They seem to combine that message with their own memory of landmarks in the landscape, so they can form an expectation of what the route should look like and fly more efficiently.
The bees are not acting like tiny robots blindly following instructions. They are using the dance as a guide, then matching it against what they already know about the area, and when expected landmarks are missing, they search in a less direct way.
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-honeybees-communication-landscape.html
